Joy Guidry – Radical Acceptance LP

From Marshall Trammell:

Somewhere it is written that the American author James Baldwin said that the English language is the enemy of Black people. Indeed, the straight-jacket of systemic limitations needs to be perceived to be overcome. I hear Guidry’s vernacular as a cultural methodology relevant to addressing the roles of artists making an impact on society today. Their tempered and hybrid phonics renders revelations of beauty, revelations of possibility, validation, self-awareness, creative problem solving, balance of openness with structure and other virtues of Improvisation, as stated by long-time Houston-based, music educator and Improviser David Dove in “Music is the Pedagogy.”

Ambient electronic tracks wait for you like light pools of warmth and resonance. Their placement in a timeline of the album designates them as unique transformative portals and democratic spaces within the narrative. Synthesizing Chela Sandoval’s five technologies of the Methodologies of the Oppressed which incorporates how we see the world (semiotics), make sense of it (deconstruction), relate it to history (meta-ideologizing), formulate new modalities of action (differential movement) to, finally, erect, defend and maintain democratic spaces (democratics). The journey of Radical Acceptance opens your eyes to move beyond sense-making into the creation of knowledge itself and our social environment.

Radical Acceptance sounds like tactical media quilt code from the Underground Railroad. Imagine next to the concrete examples of the “North Star,” the “Log Cabin, the Drunkard’s Path,” and now we have “Radical Acceptance.” The album is a community informatic and liberatory tool for your emancipation and self-determination travel kit from a cultural archive of a disciplined, mind tempest. I believe the album is a conduit distributing the listener into a resonant real or imagined geography. With tracks as appendages, the recording moves on its own: auto-motive. Its own power embodies statements, scars and wisdom, offering a modality for when navigating community accountability. Entropic tracks like “Inner child,” “Why Is Toxicity So Yummy” and “How To Breathe While Dying” are sweetly deceptive and agile transgressions of common arcs in narrative formations of collective performance amidst layered solo versatility adds a nuanced blend of vernacular wisdom.

The poetics of the archival sounding material in “72 Hours,” each feels like an environmental sound design installation reminiscent of Leroy Jones’ (Amiri Baraka, of course) Blues People when he addresses the ownership and limitations of the recording technologies in shaping Black Music today. “Down In The Valley ” and “Voices Of The Ancestors’ ‘ utilize uncommodifiable cultural weaponry that impossible to copyright, like Kente cloth, anchored in transformative tensegrity invoking a limitless healing rooted in African Diasporic indigeneity.

Radical Acceptance is a radical geography that defies the status quo of everyday harm that speaks straight to the senses and emotions of the listener. The organizations of sounds, tracks, rapid fingering and figures of soul-piercing resonance bring our bodies, feelings, and intuition to an evocation of a powerful relationship with those who we’re performing alongside, and those who are listening to us.

Wave after wave of sonic blasts fuel my descent into an afrological discipline of unique technologies. The album is welcoming intoning agency, social necessity, personality, difference and community accountability, in recognition of a strong relationship to sonic popular, experimental folk cultures. I have been hungry to hear a voice of a Creative musician speaking directly to listeners communicating critical information. Their words are not ambiguous.

I chased down references while driving. In the tracks I hear a timeline archived moving back and forth between the different layers of technologies and cultural methodologies amidst their musical consciousness in the interpretation, creation and transmission of self-determination in a historical continuum. Radical Acceptance is an interpersonal healing narrative carrying the ethos of a warrior that is responsive and inspiring community accountability. Radical Acceptance presents both the warrior and their ecology of a disciplined, mind tempest.

I urge listeners to get Radical Acceptance into your soul. Get it under your fingertips. Throughout the moving landscape of the recording I hear familiar colloquial blends of disciplines contributing a dialect erected from the need to describe and control one’s circumstances, to confront life and outwit death, and, finally, as a proof of power. Hybridity-smacking, creole statements ring out as manifestation of a tight cultural and familial background suggests places and conditions of the Southern US, and simultaneously a legacy of sonorous defiance in NYC.

From Joy Guidry:

Radical Acceptance is a personal practice that has evolved in my life over the past year. This doesn’t mean there aren’t still tough times, but times of warmth and comfort are much more present these days. I will never be able to change my past, the things that hurt me, but I can live in a peaceful and beautiful life of my own creation. The most important thing I’ve had to teach myself is that there is nothing wrong with my body or my brain. My body is fat, and I struggle with my mental health daily, and neither of those things make me any less of a human being. I know that my Black, Fat, Queer and Non binary body is valid in every way. Learning to love my whole self unconditionally will be a lifelong journey, but I am just so happy to be where I am today. This is my radical acceptance.